Reviews for American technological sublime

The average rating for American technological sublime based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-08-13 00:00:00 Christian Mensing If Leo Marx or Perry Miller can be credited with first inventing the Technological Sublime as a field of study, then David Nye can be credited with crafting its most definitive (if not compelling) manifesto. He approaches the topic with a historian's eye for events, a philosopher's terminology, and a sociologist's sense for the broader effects of his chosen examples on the American people. He draws upon sources as diverse as Kant and Durkheim, Emerson and the Niagara Falls Electrical Handbook (published in 1904). The list goes on: Norman Mailer, Henry James, Edmund Burke, Peter Conrad, and many (many) others appear in Nye's bibliography. He even references David McCullough, who has penned such popular works as John Adams, Truman, and The Great Bridge. Apart from the pithy thoroughness of this book, Nye has done something no one else has before: he has demonstrated, far beyond my ability to contradict, the substitution of the corporate experience of the technological sublime for the individual's experience of the religious as an American tradition. While I would probably not go so far as Nye does and exclude other nations from this trend, there is something about the energy of an American crowd on the Fourth of July or at the opening of a new skyscraper (particularly in the 20's and 30's)--or the 1939 New York World's Fair, or the dedication of the Brooklyn and Golden Gate Bridges, not to mention all of the dams and railways and other technological marvels of the last two centuries--that evokes a kind of religious experience that formerly would have been reserved for the great natural wonders of the world. Nye's prose is dry. That's a fact. The closest he ever comes to unleashing his personal voice is when he narrates how visitors to the Grand Canyon often "assume that humans dug the canyon or that they could improve it so it might be viewed quickly and easily" (p289), and how several people fall into the Grand Canyon and die every year--people whose relatives then "sue the Park Service because there were no fences or guard rails--as if a terrifying immensity that people journey great distances to see ought to have hand rails and warning signs" (p290). Perhaps Nye's general restraint is actually a strength when reading this book as a guidebook to the technological sublime, but dry prose does tend to make it hard for me to connect to the text. There are some questions that Nye never addresses--for instance, why he chose to focus on the collective experience of the sublime instead of the personal one. Perhaps he felt that, having put on a socio-historian's hat, he ought to study the group dynamic of the technological sublime. Perhaps he would argue that the sublime is not a feeling (as I, and several of my classmates would probably argue) but rather a term defining the American public's religious veneration of technological marvels. Whatever the case, Nye is so specific in his focus that he forgets his readers may not have the same definition of the sublime as he does. Still, if you're looking for a comprehensive work on the significance of technology in America, you can't overlook Nye's American Technological Sublime. Give it some time to percolate.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-06-12 00:00:00 Jill Rice This was a quite comprehensive survey of the American fascination with technological innovation. Covering structures like bridges and skyscrapers, and forms of power including steam, electricity and nuclear reactions, the author makes a a consistent case, and to some degree makes observations about the American character. It's unfortunate that the book was published just as the next wave of technology (the Internet) was becoming popular, because it would have been interesting to see how or whether something as comparatively abstract as information and data would fit with the definition of sublime, or perhaps be, in some way, the ultimate example of the technological sublime (transcending the individual.)